We are often asked what materials are best to use in a modern office for flooring. This is an area where you can introduce a bold colour or design, and even use different colours to indicate different zones, or fire routes. Traditional carpets on a roll are not really ideal, as they can be tricky to repair (wear and tear and coffee damage happens far quicker in an office environment than it would in a domestic one due to the increased traffic). However carpet tiles are a good solution as they allow the user to replace single tiles at a time. If the carpet is made with a thick pile, then it is often hard to see any joins and the finish is similar to that of a roll, but without the drawbacks.  Carpet tiles can also be useful when used with a raised floor as they can allow easy access to the wiring below the floor, and are usually supplied at the same size as the raised floor grid tiles (600×600mm). For areas such as coffee points where a carpet could quickly become stained a vinyl floor-covering works well. You can get a realistic wood effect vinyl that is actually laid in strips (like wooden planks) which allows for access under the floor should it be needed, and has several advantages over traditional wood, or laminate flooring products. One of the key advantages here is that the vinyl is quiet when walked upon; this may not seem a big deal, but many offices that were refurbished in the late 1990s with laminate floors soon found that the constant sound of heels on the wooden floor became a real problem.  Vinyl is also very hardwearing and water resistant and so is a good choice for offices looking for a modern appearance. There are even companies that produce vinyl floor tiles that look like steel flooring for an industrial effect, or you can even get tiles with  holograms set within them for a futuristic feeling.

For advice on office interior design, give us a call and we can discuss how we can bring your space up to date.

Most new build offices will be designed with a raised floor, but what exactly is this and how can it help to improve your office design? Basically a raised floor is a series of metal floor tiles laid over a raised grid that allow you to position electrical floor boxes anywhere within your office. This can then allow for much greater flexibility of office layout design as it means that desks do not necessarily need to be grouped in spurs coming directly off an external wall. The “spur design” tends to be the usual layout for most 1960s office buildings as these were designed with open plan in mind, but without knowing that the computer would become the standard office tool, and therefore access to electrical and network points would become so important. The raised floor allows the office furniture layout design to dictate the location of the floor boxes , rather than the position of electrical access points dictating the layout, giving the flexibility required to allow for islands of desks within an open plan office.

So, what can you do to have a more flexible layout if you don’t have a raised floor? Well, the first thing is that in order to avoid trailing cables, your most practical layout is likely to involve spurs of desks coming from the walls. However, you can also use any columns in the office in the same way, as it is relatively inexpensive to trunk power and data supplies up through a suspended ceiling and then down a column. Another way in which this can be implemented is via power poles; these work in the same way, having their supply via a suspended ceiling, but they can be moved, should the layout need to change in the future.

As more offices are going wireless and battery technology is improving we may soon be able to work completely wirelessly, and simply leave our laptops to charge overnight in a docking rack. This will give us a truly flexible office space and will no doubt have further impacts on office design.

The previous blog post discussed maximising natural daylight through office design, and this is the first step to helping to bring the outside in. Once your office is naturally lighter and brighter you can look at introducing some natural greenery through a few hardy indoor plants, and there are actually a number of companies that can not only supply the plants, but also offer a full maintenance service, to ensure that they stay looking at their best. A few simple large plants always look better than lots of little pots, and will also be easier to manage. The jungle look is never a good look for a modern office, and plants can get out of hand if unattended regularly, so it is always best to keep to the odd pot in desking areas (perhaps to mask an ugly column or other feature), and have a few more in breakout areas, being careful to avoid messy or fast growing varieties. There are even some very realistic plastic plants available now, but even these need a little maintenance, as they so tend to gather dust quite quickly, but these would be a good solution where the natural lighting is poor.

Once you have livened up the office with a few plants, a fresh colour scheme would also help and the current trends are for very natural colours (soft blues, greens, browns, along with plenty of white or white shades) rather than brash primary colours, and through our 3d modelling service we can show you exactly how your office design would look in a series of colour schemes. We can even show alternative space planning options with different colour schemes to give you a useful comparison, so if you would like to know more about our office interior design service, just give us a call.

With the current uncertain financial situation many companies are looking to tighten their financial belts and reduce wasted money. One of the most expensive office assets is the actual accommodation cost, and through sensible space planning it is often possible to reduce the amount of space you actually need.  We recently completed a series of projects for a local government organisation that actually allowed them to accommodate all their existing staff and furniture in a smaller overall area allowing them to actually sell off some of their office sites. This relatively inexpensive exercise freed up millions of pounds worth of property and also reduced property maintenance and running costs. We now maintain sets of plans of all their office accommodation and we are able to help them plan for the future with maximum density space plans and space analysis reports.

If you would like to discuss how we can ensure that you are not wasting money on unnecessary office accommodation, give us a call.

These days we are becoming increasingly aware of how our actions directly affect our planet, and people are beginning to see that if everyone makes small changes, together this can have a large impact. There are many ways that we can reduce our carbon footprint in our home lives, such as not leaving electrical goods on standby, recycling and turning down heating, but there are also many ways that we can do the same for our work lives. After all we spend more of our waking lives at work than we do at home, so if we want to really make a difference this is where we also need to make changes.

There are many simple things that can be done such as cutting down on paper usage; we try to do everything we can electronically now, and so we produce plans that can be read on screen, quotes and invoices are sent as PDFs, and even our fax machine is a software fax. This has reduced the amount of paper we use significantly. There are other, less obvious ways of reducing your business and employees carbon footprint, such as encouraging car sharing, allowing some degree of home working (to reduce travel), and providing facilities to allow staff to commute by bicycle (storage and shower facilities).

We can give advice as to how to become a more environmentally aware office through office design; give us a call to discuss how we can help you.

 Home working is increasingly becoming a more standard part of office life. Simpler communications, webcams, video mobile phones and mobile email have changed where and how people work, allowing for greater flexibility. However many staff who do sometimes work from home do so on the end of a bed, or dining table, and this can lead to postural problems. In an increasingly litigious society it is important to ensure that when your staff are working from home they are doing so in a way that is not going to effect their health, your productivity and possibly even leave you being sued for lack of health and safety guidance. We are able to design home working environments for your staff based upon the actual room that they are working in to ensure that you are protected and your staff work ergonomically and safely whilst out of your office. We can even recommend a Commercial Osteopath that can carry out workplace assessments to ensure that your staff know how to maintain correct posture at their desks.

Call us for more information regarding home-worker design and our ergonomics services.